Subtitle: ...and ther Hunger Games
If you read the “The Earl of That Never Happened” and/or labored through Money Games and caught any of Martha’s Recipes: Munchausen’s By Proxy before it was pulled from the web by ? then you know: my/our parents liked playing games with food.
“Wait! A minute!”
you might say
“that was all the Earl-of-That-Never-Happened
Martha just, Martha just
got Sanka-
decaffeinated
when HE went in for coffee at McDonalds and you girls were brought in-”
Yes - why were we brought into McDonalds to smell everything and look at the pictures and watch other people get fries, burgers, milkshakes and ice cream cones and watch the turnovers spin around and brown on the carousel? Yes why is it we were brought in to see and smell things we had never tasted in the years of going into this place and seeing the television commercials? Why were we brought in while the parents got themselves coffees?
“because, because, because-”
Yes why was that again?
“ We can stay in the car” I said.
“No, no you have to come inside,” one or both of parental units would and did say.
“We want to stay in the car.”
“Well you can’t”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so,”
“That’s not a reason,” I boomeranged one of my father’s lines back at him.
“You have to come in with us because of kidnappers,” one or both of the parental units said.
“We can lock the doors” I said
Some debate ensued as the parental units countered children are easily tricked and we’d unlock the doors for the kidnappers. I said no we wouldn’t but things always ended the same way and no one ever stated the real why:
you girls have to come into McDonalds with us because we, your parents, are so messed up that we, your parents, as a couple get off on watching you salivate - want and be able to have nothing. Because you ‘re not worth the price even a small soda. And yes we’ve lied to you again- and you believe coffee is the one thing at McDonalds that is cheaper here than at home.
Coming up next is the part of the game where between here and home we get to watch and gauge your reactions.
“Kidnappers…and car thieves”
“They could break the glass” one of the parental units said.
I saw all the people inside and walking around- plenty of witnesses.
“Someone would see”
“WE’RE getting coffee and YOU’RE coming in with us - GET OUT OF THE CAR!” he barked “NOW!”
Yes because of kidnappers, and car thieves, my sister and I had to go into McD’s with our parents and not be allowed to get anything, once more and as always.
For a brief time my sister developed a phobia about kidnappers. That they were going to climb through the windows having brought ladders like in cartoons. Martha liked talking about kidnappers and made sure we had memorized the phone number because of kidnappers so we were prepared:
“780-9162” we could both recite it.
And too Martha liked playing games with food, waving in front of her children and saying “no- no you can’t have any“ sometimes adding “…okay… maybe a bite, but just a little one”. That was part of the Snickers game.
History repeats.
Aversion of the Snickers game would and did happen to my second cousin(?) on my mother’s side, my cousin‘s daughter. Though my second cousin(?) struggled with her weight her mother, who was added to the line by marriage, struggled with her weight differently for the mother’s struggle with weight was putting it on and keeping weight on- a skin and bones type gal whereas her daughter struggled not to weigh too much.
What was one of her mother ‘s Snickers type games? Milkshakes.
Make a milkshake for herself, the mother was on doctor‘s orders, and then she’d drink milkshakes as her child who couldn’t and shouldn’t have milkshakes, doctor’s orders, watched. Per the milkshake game my cousin’s first wife would to say to my cousin’s second wife “I feel so badly for her/my child having to watch me drink milkshakes when she can’t have any .”
“If you feel so badly about her seeing you drink milkshakes then why don’t you make and drink the milkshakes when she/ your daughter isn’t home?” asked my godfather/cousin’s second wife.
The answer being so disturbingly obvious that naturally one can quite easily go rather blind and not see the why because its so awful. To me the milkshake game was worse than the Snickers game my mother would play- but was it? Was it really? Or do I just see it that way because it happened to some else?
Either way that milkshake thing and Snickers game- to me, that’s some pretty sick shit. Yet every night I made dinner for myself and gave my dog, my best friend, my pals who had and did physically defend me outright on more than one occasion yet I fed them some factory food mystery meat dry kibble?
The most expensive stuff around- but why weren’t they eating whatever I deemed good enough for myself?
The Veterinarians?
What I saw modeled as a kid?
Early Alpo programming via the Rosie the Robot styled babysitter?
Which again is why again I remain glad I didn’t have kids.
The Earl=of-That-Never-Happened wasn’t the only one who liked playing games with food Martha was right there with him and I don’t know that he even knew about the Snickers game. What I do know is once their food games almost killed my younger sister which if memory serves was the second time that year an ambulance would be called for my sister. Though in truth I don’t remember which ambulance came first: the Great Adventure Ambulance or Freehold’s. I only know she was the only one ambulances ever came for.
My sister had the croup or “only the croup” and there was an argument because The Earl of That Never Happened (also known as our father and previously referenced as The-Lead-Asshole-In -Charge) didn‘t want an ambulance to be called. My sister, Martha’s youngest child was turning blue but The Earl didn‘t want an ambulance because…
“He liked watching this sort of thing? “
Yeah.
Probably in part and he liked excitement and when someone could die that’s exciting, to him.
When the ambulance drivers arrived The Earl-of-That-Never-Happened tried to get the ambulance drivers to go away and said his wife was “over-reacting”. The Earl liked that word regularly describing all of us that way as “over reacting“ or “exaggerating”…I was supposed to stay in my room. Got yelled at whenever I opened my bedroom door. I had the smaller room because I was the defective kid and I remember my sister’s room always seemed so big, too big like it would swallow her whole.
But my sister wasn’t in her bedroom but the in the bathroom as I was barked at to go to room because Mom was in trouble because she had called an ambulance. Steam had been curling into the hallway for hours as I could hear my little sister choking, struggling to breathe. “Dying“ that’s what I thought, it may have even been something I said and my mother did say it.
“She will die if we don’t get her to the hospital”.
“No she won’t,” the earl had said, like he did - like it was and as if he were a god, could simply declare something and so it would be. Plus he had to shake me sometimes to get me breathing but I hadn’t died, I wasn’t allowed to and I guess he just figured the other won‘t die either. That night he was drinking scotch.
Martha had called the ambulance quietly and without telling him from somewhere in the house. We had more than one phone which back then meant you were rich and in plenty of places still means that. The Earl was furious when the sound of an ambulance siren could be heard approaching.
“DID YOU CALL AN AMBULANCE!” he yelled knowing full well my mother had.
“Yes” and Martha was crying and sounding like a child in trouble because he was angry at her. Because she wouldn’t let her baby die? or suffer longer? or maybe because in part too if one child dies like that people might start asking questions?
So Martha was on the defensive, there seemed to have been some talk about whether or not to go to the door and I don’t remember who let the ambulance drivers in but there had been some effort to get them to go away. The Earl applied his social mask. The earl kept his social mask on through out - even fortified his ’I-m-a-great-guy-routine but the medical personal saw a kid who was clearly in shades of blue.
One of them barked
“This child should be in hospital“
“Why didn’t you call us sooner?“ There was something accusatory in the tone.
“We didn’t think it was that bad- did we honey?“ said the Earl fully socially masked and beaconing his wife to join him. Martha retorted “I told you so”.
My sister was in the hospital for a long time. I kept asking when she’d get to come home
“In two or three days”
But the time kept changing, then it was one more day, a few more days. I wonder if some questions weren’t asked. If there wasn’t perhaps a delaying of sending her home for the very reason they’d nearly let her die, and if the earl had his way she probably would’ve died and I’d be all alone with the two them again.
The second time my parents almost killed my sister was at an amusement park.
Okay maybe they didn’t almost kill her but it was the second time an ambulance was called. The amusement park was called “Great Adventure” . Many roller coasters, flume rides- it was a major attraction and people came from other states just to spend the day at Great Adventure. Martha and her husband were of course continuing the food games: No food or water: all day. We’d get ride lots of rides and all day long but I don’t think we were told we wouldn’t be allowed food or water
It was summer and as the ambulance driver would later inform my parents it was over a hundred degrees. I’ll never know if they planned it specifically so we’d be there on a really hot day? The Earl made those kinds of plans and Martha played obey thy husband to perfection. But the heat wave may have just been coincidence and just happened to have landed on the day The-Earl -of That-Never -Happened and his L.O.W/Lovely-Obedient-Wife happened to be bring their two daughter to Great Adventure. It was very nearly after that my sister requested a toy machine gun.
We all of course went into the food courts because the no food and water allowed at Great Adventure was much like the McDonalds game but with I believe an added flair.
The food court next to the flume ride- you know the one where the boats you ride in on what essentially a roller that incorporates water? The boats on Great Adventure’s flume ride looked like real wood or were carved out of logs? Next to that water /flume ride there was lodge style building.
The air lodge style building was a lovely and perfect compliment to the log style flume rides and at this eating and drinking venue they served foot long hot dogs that smelled very different from what we were served at home. And soda pop. And orange juices served from plastic orange fruit shape plastic containers and apple juices also in plastic containers that looked like apples and were round and you could drink out of with straws that stuck out of the plastic green leaf design on top. My sister and I had never seen anything like this place Great Adventure. The rides were like nothing we’d ever seen, and the place and so many people and the food and the drinks shaped like food and on the menus there might even have been just plain water. Or ice?
“No its too expensive,” the Earl said of food and water that day. No food or water allowed…but of course we were taken into every food and beverage menu to read all the prices.
Did the parents go all day without eating? or having anything to drink? Nothing.
And no we weren’t poor that’s not what this was about- nor was food or drink ever perceived as a luxury by either parental unit and we would watch both eat and drink themselves to where I‘ll never understand how they each didn‘t weigh several hundred pounds. They’d go out for fancy meals. Always bought new cars.
So did the both parents, like the children go all day without food or water? Did perhaps one or both parents have food and water but hide it from the girls? a game- like the McDonalds game and the Snickers game?
The parents were allowed to go to the bathrooms by themselves and did that day, even Martha who always took us with her.
There were apparently long lines for the bathrooms at Great Adventure, even the men’s room had a long wait. That’s what we were told. I don’t know if Martha had any money with her, if she would have gone and gotten herself something but not us or if she would have decided if her children weren’t allowed anything neither would she have anything. Those last two ideas are how I like/d to see her and how she like/d to be seen.
Did the parents tag team that day?
One watch the kids while the other got the food and water as its been decided we won‘t give them today? Or maybe just him- maybe it was announced at the park to all, even my mother? What about just her? Naw and if so he’d have seen that and wanted in on that action. All I know is the kids went all day without food or water though I like to think there was a water fountain somewhere.
It was like McDonalds we could watch everyone else eat and drink, we could smell it we just couldn’t have any. Neither of the parental units wanted to stand in line for a coffee or a Sanka in the indoor and air conditioned Ice Cream Palace. “It’s too hot for coffee” the Earl said with that air of disgust and ‘you’re stupid’ that I came to equate with being me. Though staying longer in the air conditioning was something that seemed like a good idea. We of course weren’t allowed to get anything in the ice cream palace, just taken in to look. We never sat down in the Ice Cream Palace until Fred Handrich.
You wouldn’t know the Ice Cream Palace is an ice cream shaped palace from the ground or at kid angle -it just looked like a fancy building it wasn‘t unti lyou went on the floating cable cars that you found out it was an ice cream palace. Great Adventure also had this ride near the Ice Cream Castle like a merry -go round but with seats hanging from a mirrored ceiling? Or was it the merry-go-round that had the mirrored ceiling- and beautifully painted horses…both rides spun and then there was how the ice cream castle got its name? I don’t know that the Ice Cream Castle is what it was called only that there were cable cars that hooked up to a cable in the air and the cable car would rise above the ground so high you could see the entire park - all the rides and the land and the planned outdoor zoo where you could ride through in a car like in an African Safari. My sister and I were years away from watching a group of bamboos peal the vinyl off of someone’s car roof. There would be a sign someone would ignore warning people with vinyl roofs that the park was not liable for damage to vinyl roofs specifically. Convertibles were strictly prohibited.
Bamboos really enjoy peeling vinyl from automobile roofs
but it was until I’d see that
this was our first trip to Great Adventure and we weren’t allowed to have any food or water. We could go on whatever rides we wanted as long as we were tall enough. That’s when I first saw, really saw, the Ice Cream Palace. Because only from above can you really, really see what it is, what you can’t see from the ground.
The roof was amazing and painted, domes unseen from the ground and painted like melting flavors of ice cream with sprinkles and cherries and whipped cream on a building seemingly built of sundaes, floats or banana splits.
My sister and I got to go on that cable car ride and see that roof, - and we got to go on any ride we were tall enough for we just weren’t allowed to eat or drink anything.
I don’t know if Martha knew that this would be and was the day the Earl had planned. Once I’d have said she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t plan such a thing. But that was the upside of amnesia from a TBI all the old defenses for her fell away and I see what I saw without automatically declaring her innocent though I wouldn’t survived them without that, its not and wasn’t reality.
“My mother would never hurt me on purpose“, that was the lie a I told myself. Anyone who read Martha’s Recipes knows that was the lie I told, the lie I told myself and fed myself.
Food and water were “too expensive” at Great Adventure or so my sister and I were told. But we could go on any and every ride at Great Adventure because unlike at fairs they do not charge per ride but for the day. So you can ride whatever rides look fun as many times as you want as long as you stand in line, long lines and on this particular day and weekend New Jersey was in a heat wave.
Usually you waited in line for a ride for an hour and sometimes more depending on the ride and sometimes less depending on the ride and when you weren‘t standing in the sun anymore it was almost as good as getting to go on the amusement park ride just to be in the shade. Flumes and rollercoasters had the longest waits in line but on a flume you could get head to toes drenched in water which is wonderful when its hot and I remember us wanting and trying to drink some of the flume water but that was an issue because our hands could get crushed? and we were “embarrassing” our parents… and the water was “dirty“.
People came to Great Adventure very early in the morning, waited in line and stayed till past dark when things that glowed were sold. The glowing things came in pink and green for sure and yellow but I don’t remember about the other colors that glowed like neon and were the colors of candy. They were glow in the dark necklaces but you could bend and turn them into bracelets or throw them like Frisbees or use them like hoola hoops on your arms and legs. I remember seeing other kids with them and watching them do things like that…but I don’t remember if we stayed the whole day that first year we went to Great Adventure, that may have been stuff we got to see the next year.
The best year ever at Great Adventure was when Fred Handrich, formerly of Peter B, took his daughter and us on a weekday!
That was years later.
At first the plan was that The-Earl-of-That_Never -Happened and Mr. Handrich were going to take us, me and my sister, and Fred’s daughter Marie to Great Adventure on a weekday! So hardly any crowds or waiting in line because mostly people cam eon the weekends.
But then the plan changed and we got to go to Great Adventure without The-Earl-of-That Never-Happened. Going anywhere without the Earl was always the best way to go. AND that best year at Great Adventure Mr. Handrich took us to the Ice Cream Palace AND we got to eat there AND he said we could have anything we wanted.
Which was very strange for my sister and I.
Mr. Handrich was, would be, from church and I don’t know if he and my father were friends. I know his wife Nancy was my mother’s friend and I know his daughter Marie was my friend, and a bit my sister‘s but Marie and I were the same age and in choir together. I know neither of my parents was ever really my friend. And I know most friends if they’re both taking their daughters to Great Adventure together would probably wait until their friend didn’t suddenly “have to go to work“ that day.
Also I know The Earl of That Never Happened might have told Fred how it would be at Great Adventure- about the Great Adventure Food Games and I know Mr. Handrich would have wanted no part of that. Instead he made sure we had nicest time ever at Great Adventure. I think the only time I ever really relaxed at that park was with Mr. Handrich and Marie. It was nice and so were they.
Great Adventure, the first time, was for me the second time I watched my parents almost kill my sister. But this time in public.
You can probably guess what happened. My sister was pre-K just a baby out of diapers walking really. Heat above a hundred degrees, all day in the sun no food or water. Probably upset too not that either of us threw tantrums or public shows or even whined or pouted much. I don’t know how this was ‘training’ was ‘achieved’. I don’t remember. Never did. Hope I never do. I’m sure if there was any voicing of thirst or hunger the answer would surely have been “then we’ll have to go home because food and water are too expensive here”- its how The Earl rolled.
I remember how pink my sister’s face was that first day at Great Adventure, just before. I remember the curly red tufts of her hair sticking to her flushed face. I remember they kept making her walk and finally let us sit on the grass or put her on the grass so maybe she would cool. I remember one of those white carts with the umbrellas on top. I don’t remember when my sister passed out. I remember the Earl went into his I-m-a-great-guy-routine, looking very serious and concerned when the park or county’s ambulance team arrived. I remember the Earl-of-That-Never-Happened acted as if he wasn’t at all aware it was over a hundred degrees. I remember the Earl of That Never Happened acted very interested and newly informed that one must hydrate, particularly small children, during heat waves. And I remember being angry because my sister was allowed to pass out and I had to keep going. If it had been me, he’d have started shaking me.
But maybe he did shake her I don’t know. It wasn’t either parent who called the ambulance but loud, noisy, not at all minding their own business loud-mouthed New Jersey types who kept saying things like “that child is going to pass out” “someone needs to do something” “you need to get that child into some place cool” and then finally one of those Yankee types that they hate down south called in an ambulance because a little girl went into “heat stroke“.
The Earl social masked, acted as if he had no idea there was even such a thing as heat stroke. I don’t remember if either parental unit mentioned that they’d been withholding food and water from their children all day. Or if they were asked and had lied.
I remember we did get to go into some place cool after, after my sister was cooled down and I remember being so jealous that she got something to drink from the ambulance people when I still had to be thirsty.
That was our first trip to Great Adventure.
We went other places too: to the bank and the grocery store. Later, after the year my mother held me back from going to school, school.
First it was time for me to go to school and then it wasn’t.
Then for some reason there was a year’s wait. I don’t remember if I went for and taken for more pre-school or just kept at home. I don’t remember any kind of a graduation thing like my sister had in nursery school, there are no pictures of me having graduated from nursery school. So I don’t know if I was in nursery school for an extra year or if I graduated or why my mother really held me back and didn‘t want me going to school. Maybe because of what happened when I entered the first grade. Martha/L.O.W./Lovely Obedient Wife was called to task by my first grade teacher for not making sure I knew how to read, the former teacher didn’t teach her kids to read or write. That was some one else’s job. Thus I was the last kid to learn how to read in my year.
I remember Martha would say about nursery school that “a child has to be social by three or they’ll never be social” as to why I was being taken to nursery school, like she was quoting a manual.
There hadn’t seem to be any kids where we moved unlike before New Jersey and that nursery school. In where my sister was born there were lots of kids, there’d been lots of kids and people’s houses to go to. Then we moved to New Jersey and everything disappeared. The adults didn’t like being called by their first names and we had to call everyone Mr. or Mrs. and there were no kids our age to play with, not until I started elementary school and then suddenly it turned out there were kids living just a few houses away.
Even after I went to elementary school and then even after both my sister and I were in elementary school my mother took us on errands. Its strange to me now that she never did these during the day? Our lives revolved around her- not the other way around.
Thank goodness for adult social pressure because any lessons, any places to go and fun things to do those were usually from other people.
Any relatives reading this will certainly say: that’s not how it was!
To which I’d say: you weren’t around.
And most especially not you Mr “I’ll Always Be There If You Need Me” as Al aptly coined you.
My sister and I were like show dogs. Which was true always and not just when our parental units wouldn’t hydrate us or feed us because on the flip side of that coin they would take us to fancy restaurants to show off the good table manners of their two prized poodles. Be complimented about our good behavior while we smiled and would be happy because life was so much better when it wasn’t just the four of us, life was at its worst when it was all four of us.
Once, even when time just a few of the Morgs and not the entire herd visited us New Jersey the kids went to Great Adventure…by themselves! My parents took them to the beach and when they became hungry The Earl bought a huge bag of McDonalds for Morgs.. Shocked, I just stood and stared. I couldn’t believe The Earl would feed kids because they were hungry, much less come back with a huge bag of McDonalds hamburgers. But of course these were Jack’s kids, and Jack was The Earl’s brother-in-law and how the Earl of That Never Happened was keeping the job he was boozing and whoring around during.
But then Jack retired, the Morgs bought a Cadillac convertible and came to visit before they left for Texas. During that visit I aced, a borrowed term from tennis, so many times during my serve at the volley game that it was actually quite weird. Like 5 or more aces in a row wherever the volleyball would go would be the fake out point where somebody always thought somebody else had it, which was odd because the Morgs were very athletic. By the time it was at “for the game” I had been on serve for going on ten points. most of it and my cousin team mates kept saying, don’t be nervous and “no pressure, no pressure“ and “just one more” until we won.
It was because we were having company that the volleyball net was put up, would be, could be. Other wise it wasn’t allowed. If there wasn’t company or our parents weren’t entertaining there was no volleyball allowed. The volleyball net and ball like most things weren’t for us, we weren’t allowed to play with them. They were props for when there was company or when the parental units were entertaining and having people over.
We weren’t to have the vollyball net up at other times. We weren’t allowed to put it ourselves. No they wouldn’t put the volleyball net up because it (having a volley ball net up) didn’t look good… and was bad for the lawn.
My initially weren’t allowed to go sailing after our parents joined a yacht club. Initially - well now the yacht club really deserves its own separate space.
We, my sister and I, weren’t allowed to play with or use anything that belonged to our parents and were only allowed to start going to the park and use their equiptment because of the marks on the garage door.
The parental units had gotten new tennis rackets for themselves and even showed them off to us, the old tennis rackets went to the basement. Either my sister or myself decided that since the rackets weren’t being used ever because our parents got new ones that meant we could maybe play with the old tennis rackets. The tennis balls that were some word I don’t remember, but not good anymore- oh yeah “dead” we were allowed to have the dead tennis balls rather than them being thrown in the trash. I remember which ever parental unit had been asked if we could have the balls was suspicious about the request and wanted to know what we were going to do with them?
“Play”
‘Don’t break anything”
“Okay”
Eventually we had a few balls and two tennis rackets. We’d seen tennis on television, our parents watched tennis matches with Jimmy Connors and that name was on the wood “belongs in the trash” tennis rackets my sister and I started playing with.
Both the parental units played tennis and would go play tennis together while my sister and I would be baby sat. Sometimes they came home still in a tift about a ball having been “in” or “out”. Sometimes they “doubles” with other couples. But once my mother won. Just she and my father playing tennis and Lovely-Obedient-Wife won, beat him at tennis. Our father never played tennis together again. But maybe he took it back up after the divorce.
My mother, Martha on the other hand took tennis lessons and played tennis even into my middle school years. She never once hit a ball around with either my sister or myself, we were kind of beneath her you see. She’d take us to the swimming club in the summer, she’d sit with other mothers doing needle point as the kids swim the women take turns watching the kids and talking; there were life guards but for Jersey Moms that‘s really entirely enough. At the swimming club Martha would go off for her tennis lessons. And maybe to play tennis with someone else?- that I don’t remember much about but I think that’s how she and Mrs. Rosen became friends. None of the needle pointers played tennis.
I had asked if I could have tennis lessons too but tennis lessons were too expensive for me to have them, same with skating lessons “too expensive” riding was different “you’re allergic to hay”. But when they were lessons one or more of the other mothers were providing their children Martha would then provide those lessons. That’s how I came to be get ballet & tap, art lessons and swimming lessons: social pressure. I wanted to ride horses, skate and play tennis all of which were too expensive or I was allergic. My sister wanted to take dance lessons and wasn’t allowed to, probably because she wanted dance lessons.
Neither my sister or I ever had tennis lessons but we really liked playing tennis and had wanted to- or at least I had and started using the garage door with my Jimmy-Connors-wooden “belongs in the trash” tennis racket and “dead“ balls.
My sister and I started playing something like racquetball but with tennis rackets and only one wall. Tennis became my new favorite thing to do and my sister and I would do it and not fight or argue, just play. Unlike the gingerbread house debacle but that was coordinated by the parental units unlike tennis in the driveway.
Eventually the ecru garage door began showing the signs of our attempting to play tennis without a court or one of those concrete walls you can play off of and practice. There was just such a self play and practice wall and tennis courts a few blocks away from our house across from our school. Neither my sister or I were allowed to go there because of kidnappers and the parents only ever went there with each other to play tennis but no one ever took us there.
The garage door having little round marks from the tennis balls was “ruining” the doors which would now “have to be painted because” I hadn’t “known better”. I hadn’t known better for weeks and maybe months while simultaneously the units hadn’t known better but of course The-Earl-Of-That-Never-Happened and L.O.W never hadn’t known better but they were the adults and therefore not responsible.
But I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to play tennis. I wasn’t allowed to go to the park. My mother didn’t like for me to go anywhere.
It was strange how she kept us locked in that house.
Having friends over was always an issue because “the house isn’t clean enough they’ll go home and tell their mothers I have a dirty house“. I’d reassure her that wouldn’t happen. I’d look around as mother would say this and be perplexed as everything was usually in exactly and precisely its place. Things were only ever clean enough if she, my sister and my self had just cleaned every bathroom, dusted every room and double vacuumed all the carpeting. Then it, the house, and we were ready for company.
Finally I gave up trying to have friends over because every time I’d ask it would be the same thing over and over again. When I stopped asking and had given up then Martha wanted to know “why don’t YOU ever have any friends over?”
I feel pretty certain my reply was “I don’t know”.
It was a trap- she’d ask a question and if you told her the real answer- the truth like “because any time I ask if someone can come over you say the house is too dirty when its not- just because its not like when company is coming.”
The thing with Martha was an honest answer and she’d mostly look either confused or hurt so in answer to most questions from Martha my safest answer was almost always “I don’t know”.
Eventually Martha turned her never letting me ask friends over because the house wasn’t clean enough into a hugely embarrassing incident.
For some reason Martha/my mother/Lovely-Obedient-Wife/L.O.W suddenly wanted me to have friends over. I decided to invite one girl over whom I had never been to her house or she to mine. I would never be invited to her house in return.
In kid world it was essentially a meet and greet, a debut, a let’s see if there’s a possible friendship here - which of course calls for just the right mix of interested but not too interested, not needy or desperate or weird, fun but not a spaz,etc.. Little did I know when made the invitation Martha had pre-planned what in kid world was the height of weirdness for just hanging out and playing a little after school.
It was ridiculous. I kept asking Mom/Martha/L.O.W not to do this. But just like I tried telling her kids really don’t sit around talking about whose house is and is not dusted- that we really don’t care about this stuff- she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t hear.
Or maybe she did know and was trying to embarrass me? I don’t know. I also know she had to be included somehow- it couldn’t just be me and a friend. There couldn’t be that much freedom? She had to still be in charge?
By the time my friend came to the door I was so glad to see her and but then there was my mother, escorting my maybe new friend inside and very much playing the part of hostess. It was weird. Her manner reminded me a lot of my father, maybe because there were things I’d heard him say like “May I take your coat?” “Please come in” - it was almost like she was imitating or being him-ish because in her realm I wasn’t having a friend over I was or we were “entertaining”.
We kids weren’t to go outside or decide anything together to do. Martha had decided everything: first was there a tour of the house? The parental units always liked showing the house as if it were for sale and they were realtors. “This is the living room“, and this is the blah blah blah- I mean they’d even open coat and linen closets to show you how tidy, well organized, clean, well decorated and appointed they were.
But usually that was just for “company”. This was “entertaining”. I had tried telling Martha it wasn’t entertaining but Martha had wanted to make it “special”. After all the times I wasn’t allowed to have friends over, after all the years of that now she wanted to make it special. And I couldn’t talk her out of it and she wouldn’t not do it and it wasn’t for me it was for her because she liked these types of productions.
All the dining room furniture had been recently polished. The silver had been polished and laid out upon a double table cloth and triple color experience of mahogany, - hmm was it the forest green table cloth under the Irish lace or was it burgundy under the lace? No the burgundy came later.
So lace table cloth, dining room, polished silver. Cloth napkins, china, me and a fellow third or fourth grader. Sadly there were probably also crystal water glasses involved. Martha didn’t set a place for herself just walked into and out of the room like she was playing the part waitress and hostess simultaneously. She served the “special” pastries she had picked up from a bakery, the one and only time I ever remember her getting something from a bakery.
There’d be nothing easy and casual about having a friend over, ever.
My would be maybe friend and I ate our pastries. Martha engaged in questions as if at a cocktail party: what does your father do? Where are you from?
My would be maybe friend looked uncomfortable and so was I. Eventually we had finished our pastries and asked if we could be excused and Martha acted as if that was strange question “Of course you can girls go play”. She might have made the suggestion where and what to do actually, she threw in something specific I should show my would be maybe friend. The spotlight was now removed from Martha/my mother/L.O.W and we were to go have wonderful time because she had done this wonderful thing. Which of course in kid world wasn’t wonderful at all, it was just weird and my would be maybe friend looked at me I knew I was a piece of this weirdness, she wouldn’t see me as not being part of the weirdness.
And now.
Now I don’t know that Martha didn’t know just what she doing even at the time. I did and would talk to her about it and she’d acted as if she didn’t know. “Acted” is probably the right word, though too so often she did seem confused but sometimes she wasn’t - sometimes, maybe a lot of the time she knew what she was doing.
My sister wasn’t there that day, for this entertaining of a third grader with stuff she only used during major holidays. Arrangements had been made so my sister would be at someone else’s house for this event “so she wont be jealous” my mother had said.
Whatever playing or maybe friends was or could have been wasn‘t I was so embarrassed and my would be maybe friend was uncomfortable and that couldn’t and didn’t leave. In retrospect she might have even been afraid because it was that strange a setting. Maybe if we’d known each other better before my mother- but there wasn’t enough foundation for what had just occurred - kid land has foundations just like adult land. What my new maybe be my friend had just seen and experienced? I don’t even know if we talked at school anymore. I just remember an unfortunate silence ever after my mother dismissed us from the table.
That was a memory tangent.
This is a rough draft and I don’t even know why I’m writing.
Maybe because David died and I just found out about it. Maybe because of my own situation because its too precarious, too precarious to have not left a record because these things, these tendencies repeat. I know my sister will repeat parts of it. The only question is which ones?
And given that even someone who married into the family played the kind of food games that were played on my sister and me and my godfather’s daughter…to one degree or another I can write again at times and I don‘t see burying all this as helping anyone or anything- just seems like burying this sort of thing encourages more of the same.
Maybe these weird food behaviors go on in a lot of family units? I don’t know. Control games- definitely. I once knew a girl who was weighed in every week (and she didn’t have a weight or food problem- had never been to a fat camp but her father wasin politics and her mother wanted the girl to look a certain way for photographs of the family during campaigns). So this girl I knew was weighed in every week and if she wasn’t a particular weight she was grounded for the entire weekend.
My mother usually shopped for food with my sister and I with her and this remained the case even after my sister and I were both in elementary school, then middle school, then high school. Years later it would be revealed that this may have been because left to her own devices with a week or sometimes a month worth of food Martha would and had come home and eaten a weeks worth of groceries. Vomit. Eatten some more. Vomit some more. And gorge some more and purge some more and so on and so on until she had to cover up the evidence and clean up because we’d be home from school soon and ‘he’d’ be home from “his long day at the office” where it would turn out the hookers across the street from JCP…’s headquarters knew ‘him’ by name, The Earl of That Never Happened though they called him “John”, cat called him really, from across the street.
That was after David’s father retired from his position as Vice President and how the Earl eventually brought his family to the office in an attempt to save his job which half worked because he was offered a permanent pay freeze and no chance of advancement or transfer. Ever.
I know this of course because I became my mother’s emotional and psychological spouse at about age eleven just before or after but somewhere within the vicinity of a grocery store, probably the A&P. I was ordered from the back seat where my sister and I had always argued and arguing over who was on whose side when I was abruptly moved to the front passenger seat. At first I thought this was simply a punishment, a way to get my sister and I to stop arguing over vinyl turf but the move would be permanent. From that point on any time my mother drove us anywhere or we went with her for errands I was to be in the front of the car. I’d open the back door to get in the back seat and Martha would ask me what I was doing? Or why wasn’t I sitting in the front seat with her? Or why do you want to sit in the back seat?
“I don’t know” was probably the reply.
Was it everyday after this? I don’t know. But this is when it started: if the Earl wasn’t driving it was simply understood that the passenger side front seat was where I was supposed to sit.
It was winter, a few weeks before Christmas and my mother pulled the car over, ordered me out of the back seat and into the passenger seat. I saw my own shock and surprise reflected in my younger sister’s eyes because this “stop touching me- you‘re on my side” thing had been going on between us off and on for as long I could remember. Moving me up front to the passenger seat wasn’t a punishment or to break us up or to make a point about being more quiet or quiet in the car but because Martha had decided that she needed to talk and I would be listening.
That’s when Martha started talking- now my sister would say that’s when Martha started talking ‘to’ Maren. But Martha never rarely talked ‘to’ or ‘with’ Maren but ‘at’ Maren. Talking at someone is very different, it’s a monlogue- like all this writing- but you the reader can leave but me- for the next six years I’d be in the front seat of a car with a mad woman very much on the edge who far too many times I and my sister from were talking out of suicide. I’d be trying to say whatever would make Martha/Mom/L.O.W feel better and sometimes even tried reasoning with her. Eventually we were recommending and then pleading with her to get a divorce.
None of the behaviors were quid pro quo. In other words I never got back from that woman nearly as much as she took.
L.O.W and the Earl had that in common- big selfish psycho infants with children. We, my sister and I, were like flesh and blood play things who didn’t so much have feelings but behaviors. We were never sad but crying. We were never scared but crying or too quiet. We were never unhappy but not doing what kids are supposed to do. Etc
Previous to ordering me to the front passenger side Martha had liked talking about kidnappers, bears who eat children and too she liked playing the Snickers game. Mostly I liked it best when she’d put in an 8 track and we’d: Me, my sister and Martha- (the Earl was never part of our we) we’d all just sing Carpenters songs, my sister and I in the back seat. That was the best riding in the car…other than stopping for Munchkins at Dunkin donuts and driving to the Morgs while listening to Barbra Streisand sing about “New York State of Mind” .
Martha was angry when she pulled the car over and told me to get in the front seat. I was scared because I didn’t understand what was happening my sister and I always rode in the back seat together, always. It was over almost twenty years later before I understood what had happened that day.
I wanted to sit in the back seat again and watch the other cars and people and things. But that was back in the days when my sister and I were allowed to sit together in the back seat as our mother drove. After that day we’d only ride along in the back seat together when the Earl drove and my mother would seat in the front passenger seat, the seat I’d just been ordered into. Driven around for errands by a woman who didn’t shout because Martha didn’t shout but sometimes spoke loudly
“YOUR father,” she always said that the part the loudest and would refer to him over the upcoming years as just “Your father” as though she’d had nothing to do it. He wasn’t “My husband”. Never once did I hear her call him that except in social situations. Whatever the word husband meant to her he wasn’t. That she was with him was apparently our fault because he wasn’t her husband he was: your father.
“YOUR Father,” my mother said to me from the driver’s seat like an accusation as if I made him my father rather than her making him her husband happened first “He’s going to make us all homeless. We’ll be homeless in a couple of months. (Pause) but we’re going to have a nice normal Christmas and act as if -”
Now if you’re an alert reader, and not crazy, you realize that for a kid in the burbs whose parents do things like take tennis lessons and commute into “The” city every day the world has just shifted rather violently twice in under a minute.
During and leading up to Christmas my sister and I tried to do as we were told and act as if we didn’t know about the no job and everything having to do with money. My sister was better at acting than I was. I felt guilty about getting presents that year and it showed and I couldn‘t make it not show. My mother would ask me what I wanted for Christmas and I didn’t want anything, it seemed wrong.
Before that day in car with our mother the worst that had happened on running errands with Martha had been the Snickers game. And later Whoppers but she didn’t play a game with that it was more effective that it be “a secret”. A secret that we’d go to the drive through and Martha would order more Whoppers than we needed and mow down one really fast and then slow down on the second one. She got us the same kind of burger and given her drug of choice I have to give her props for never reaching over and finishing our burgers for us. Not that I remember. Then we’d sit down for dinner when the Earl got home as if we hadn’t already had a big meal.
Food and food stores were Martha’s drug dealers and she was a hard core addict. I mean bulimia is a realm I’ve never been in and can not fathom feeling strongly enough about food to make yourself sick on it and then have some more and make yourself sick on it so you can have some more. I downed some ice cream in my time and have eaten too much of something heavy on calories but the fill up and purge thing I don’t get. And I enjoy good food. I guess I just don’t get the quantity thing as my eating disorder was anorexia which is the opposite side of the scale: how much can I NOT eat.
Hmmmm- wonder how I got that eating disorder? I’d have to vote for the parental unit food games as a huge contributing factor if not causal.
But I eventually tired of not eating. Plus I knew Jane Fonda would not ever approve of such things and didn’t and she was after all my first guru. Martha didn’t have a guru though. Didn’t read. Didn’t think much? Or at least not well.
After reading “A Wrinkle Time” I was fascinated about the idea of there being a sense that everyone else somewhere else had but no one where you were had. A sense you were missing but didn’t know you were missing because no one had it. I mentioned this idea from L’Engle’s book and Martha/L.O.W became instantly hysterical and said very loudly and snappishly “That’s not possible!” . I thought it was quiet possible if an environment didn’t call for a particular sense you’d not have it or develop it because it wouldn’t be used, like limb that would atrophy. Though I don’t know that I knew that word yet only that I had just learned I couldn’t talk with my Mom about books or ideas. The only stories Martha was interested in were her soap operas.
Mom/Martha/ L.O.W/ Lovely-Obedient-Wife watched a lot of television - especially soap operas. I think she watched soap operas for approximately 3-4 hours a day. There was The Young and Restless, As The World Turns- and there was another one and I don’t remember the name…Was one of the last soaps standing. …Roger was the heavy but reformed in prison…lots of doctors but not General Hospital. There was the half hour “Capitol” but no one really watched that though one of the cast members did later show up in a re-imagination of Battle Star Gallactica.
It’s really quiet sad that I know that.
Anyway, that’s a lot of television and soaps are and were a very mind numbing variety. Martha’s mother had been hooked on one television soap opera, Martha was hooked on many soap operas and I was raised in front of soap operas. Gave them up as soon as I went to college because it so obviously was not worth my time. But for Martha there was also Phil Donohue, the morning News Shows- coffee talk stuff. The television was on constantly which in and of itself was crazy. Maybe television and not wanting “to miss anything” was why Martha would only go grocery shop when we came home from school?
Then again maybe our being in the car was how she dealt with all those groceries and not being able to start gorging on them in the car and not gorging when she got home because her children were there, witnesses. It must have made her angry too.
Now to the reader this is and would be an absurd emotional reaction on Martha’s part as it was her decision to have her children there and their presence prevented her from binging and purging, at least for the moment. So why be angry? Why the Snickers game.
I say Martha must have been angry because she so often displayed a particular behavior that seems a very anger ladden action because to me its strewn with meanness, the Snickers game. Meanness and wanting to feel powerful, wanting to exert power- but passively of course because Martha had decided that unlike her mother Mattie there would be no physical hitting or beating of her children… only the same under the table meanness of Mattie, her mother. Martha kept that. I’m sure I have plenty of that too and why I’m glad I don’t have any children to share it with.
Snickers bars were to me that same under the table Mattie meanness as, for example, Mattie‘s diamonds were to Martha. Mattie pointed out to Martha the diamond jewelry and who would get what and that there would be no diamond jewelry for Martha.
Would Mattie’s eldest daughter inherit diamond jewelry ?
Yes, and she showed Martha which piece.
Would Mattie’s’ youngest daughter inherit diamond jewelry?
Yes, and Mattie told Martha which piece…and would point it out.
Would Mattie’s daughter-in-law inherit some diamonds?
Yes, this one is for-
Would Mattie’s middle daughter Martha inherit any diamonds?
No, there were none left for Martha.
-Now that’s just hateful.-
This was all exactingly pointed out to Martha, and she could recite exactly which diamond piece was going to whom. She’d memorized it or perhaps she’d been told more than once. I don’t know. And I don’t know when that went down but after Mattie died that’s how things went down. Maybe the diamond declaration was made before I was born. But then again whether through timing or modeling I believe the Mattie’s diamond declaration inspired Martha’s Snickers game, maybe even the Great Adventure Games and the McDonalds games.
I know.
I haven’t told you about the Snickers game yet- though I’m not snickering about it.
Nor have I told you about the time Mr.-I’ll_Always-Be-There-If-You-Need-Me ( and never was) came to visit and we, the kids, got to have candy when an adult got candy, it was weird. It was memorable. Usually Martha just got Martha a Snickers bar for herself but on this day we all got candy, even the kids. That is what I said: the adults were getting candy bars and suddenly - and for the first time my sister and I were allowed to pick out a candy bar at the convenience store next to Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips.
First time ver and I don’t know that It ever happened again but on the night we got take out from Arthur Treacher’s fish and chips when Mr. I’ll -Always visited- we got to pick out AND have a candy bar just like a grown up. Mr.-I’ll-Always (and wasn’t) got a Twix Bar. Usually Martha got a candy bar and we had to watch or try not to watch her eatting it while my sister and I sat in the back seat.
We couldn’t have any of the candy bars or gum at the exit aisle but Martha said and would say “sometimes I like to get myself one of these”. Snickers. We were never allowed them except what we’d get during Halloween and then we’d have to wait a year occasionally watching our mother eat them and hoping she’d share, driving with one hand and holding her Snickers bar with the other saying “no- no you can’t have any…okay… maybe a bite”. Sometimes she’d let us have a bite of her Snickers and sometimes not. Sometimes if one of us took a bite that was too big the other child wouldn’t be allowed any. Those were the Snickers games.
When we were what I would have called all grown up when we were kids, my sister wouldn’t let me feed her cat. Got very angry that I fed her cat on Cannon Street.
It had been the cat’s dinner time and I was feeding my dog, my sister wasn’t home and the cat was crying/meowing. So of course I fed the cat.
This made my sister angry, she was put out by it “I like watching my animal eat, Pandora is mine”. After some debate, far too light on my part, I agreed never to feed her cat again.
Once or twice the cat came to me because it was hungry, my sister wasn’t home way past dinner time and I let the cat go on being hungry. I let that happen. My sister would walk in late, would coo at her hungry cat and ask “are you hungry do you want some dinner?“ same ritual every night. If she was late she wouldn’t be sorry either, she wasn’t, she’d act like she wasn’t late and the cat wouldn’t be hungrier than usual. Worst though was me because my sister knew she could count on me not intervene, that I wouldn’t or rebel. But would do and did just as ordered and requested: let the cat go hungry because the cat was hers, “mine“. That, and I so wanted a sister.
I didn’t tell my sister- “If you’re not here and it IS the animals meal time and YOUR cat is hungry I am feeding her whether you like it or not.” There would have been wrath…and a better me would have continued “ If you want to enjoy watching and hearing -your- animal eat then get home in time for her dinner.”
But I didn’t do that. I let Pandora go hungry while my dog ate.
I’ll never regret not having children because that means I never failed my own child like I failed that cat. Like I failed the Milkshake Mother’s daughter a few months later.
I traveled cross country to see if the man who was there- could be. He’s the Milkshake girl’s father. One night as they came through the door he said something so acrid. Being critical and said as if it was her fault that she “still needs counseling”. She needed counseling because the mother he chose for his child and left her with for ten years had been so very damaging. But somehow he could stand there towering a foot above irked that his daughter hadn‘t recovered from the last ten years in a the last few months he had allotted as her heal time. Her went and was down, embarrassed.
I stood there as he shamed his second teenager whom he had put in this situation in the first place. His wife didn’t stand up to him and say “don’t speak to her like that”- and neither did I. I just stood there. I didn’t even say anything to Milkshake girl about it later. I should have because somebody should have spoken up for her because she deserved better than that, better than what she got and better than what she was getting. I’m sorry C. Thanks for the stone.- I suspect I should have used it more.
History likes nothing better than to repeat.
The biggest weapon against those repetitions is knowing the history. And that means to me that maybe, maybe if I leave a trail, maybe not so much of all this will happen to the futures in my lines: Olson, Sybilrud and Alford. Or maybe they’ll recognize bits of history in process or coming before that history is in full repeat.
I mean how odd/unnerving/twisted is it that a version of the Snickers game happened to my cousin’s daughter via milkshakes? With a chick not of our line but brought into it by one of the males.
Maybe this and these types of “Hunger Games” happen in lots of families and hence why the painting that most reminded me of my father/The-Earl-of-That-Never-Happened/ the lead asshole in charge was by Goya.
Goya painted the earl, and perhaps my mother as well, under the title of Saturn...though in truth Goya could have just as easily named the image in that work after Mars. Lest for Pandora that would be true in this tale but as Pandora was and is a moon of Saturn perhaps Goya was right.
Of course Goya did not literally paint my parents- they weren’t contemporaries; I was speaking/writing figuratively.
In closing this day, September 27th 2012 I can say I didn’t plan on writing today but I did learned something. I know this now- I know why that truck painted with Fred on its back door rather than Ford was so very, very appealing to me. The name Fred instead of Ford? Why it would and did appeal to me so much I made it my Facebook profile picture. Fred instead of the my last name’s Ford, that the Earl gave me.
Thanks Mr. Handrich
I wish they were all mostly like you-
that would have made for a great adventure.
